A pre-boiled egg? What's next - a self-peeling apple or a fragrance-free
onion?

A cure for cancer, a fail-safe blocking device for child pornography on the internet, a toddler car seat that doesn’t require a PhD in architectural engineering to master: the elation with which these things would be greeted is as nothing to the reverberations of relief that echoed around the globe this weekend when the invention of the Dippy Egg was announced.

In a matter of weeks, the single, pasteurised egg in its shell – pre-boiled in an airtight plastic bag in order to preserve just the right consistency and sold in a lurid Pot Noodle-style container – will be on supermarket shelves. Gone are the days when we had to wait five, six, sometimes as many as seven minutes to enjoy just the right degree of creamy yolk. Gone are the days when you were forced to eat your boiled egg standing by the hob in your kitchen (nobody who’s anybody eats sitting down any more) rather than in its natural environment: on a commuter train during rush hour or while waiting in the queue to buy Zovirax at Boots.

“We are looking at innovation in traditional markets,” say Pork Farms, the Nottingham-based nutritional alchemists responsible for the Dippy Egg and Saucy Rolls (sausage rolls infused with ketchup). Traditional market goods do require innovation. How else do you explain the rows and rows of unsold fruit and vegetables in Sainsbury’s, while the Cheesy Wotsits shelves are empty?

Like a Pippa Middleton cookbook or a Cheeky Girls Best Of, even the most appealing basic goods are sometimes in need of a little sweetener. Quite why it has taken them this long to embark on a rebranding of the humble egg is anyone’s guess. Aside from Charles Saatchi and François “Blancmange” Hollande, I can’t think of a single thing more in need of a PR overhaul. Perhaps now the fast food industry can set its sights on the coreless, self-peeling apple (seriously, who has the time?), the fragrance-free onion and the pastel‑shaded carrot (that orange is so budget airline). Stroganoff sticks and self-combusting burgers (“All the satisfaction of your traditional burger with none of the calories!”) are already on the horizon. If there’s one thing today’s food manufacturers are aware of, it’s that the joy must be removed from eating at all costs.

As always, we’re way behind the Americans on this. For decades, our transatlantic cousins have worked tirelessly on rendering life’s alimentary pleasures obsolete. It’s only thanks to their superior nutritional sciences that I get to choose between a yoghurt that tastes of furry lactose reconstitute or the more traditional chocolate-laced banoffee-pie flavour when I hit the supermarket out here. It’s only thanks to their relentless pursuit of modernity that I bought my daughter a packet of raisins from a health food emporium only to find they were “Coca‑Cola infused”. Now the US Congress has decreed pizza a vegetable, millions of American children will grow up believing that it grows on trees. Pretty soon, it will.

In the abstraction of modern eating, the aim is to distance children and adults as much as possible from the original foodstuff. Nutritional provenance is an unsavoury business. Parents no more want to break down quite how Miss Piggy came to be lying breaded and nuggeted on their child’s plate than explain why Santa Claus works on a public holiday, year after year. Food is fuel, to be ingested straight out of a packet or container, quickly and constantly.

It has other dimensions, of course: it can make you fat or thin, beautiful or ugly. Eaten in the right quantities, it can also kill you. “Are you still working on that?” the waiters are fond of asking in restaurants out here, as you plough through the mountains of food on your plate. “No,” I’m always tempted to answer. “I’m still eating it.” Then again, what’s the use in splitting hairs?